Blue Apron ... take two!

I recently reviewed Home Chef, a DIY meal kit that gets delivered to your house complete with all the ingredients you would need to make three different dinners.

I was able to try Home Chef for one week, because one of my co-workers recently signed up for the program, which lets you invite a friend to try it for free. She also tried Blue Apron, so I got to try one of their new boxes as well.

I was thrilled to see those well-known blue labels again, and here are the dishes I made.

Chicken Khao Soi

A spicy chicken curry dish with kale, served over rice. The recipe calls for crispy wonton noodles to serve as the starch (like pasta) but unfortunately these were the only thing missing from my box, so I served the curry over rice. This was so flavorful and I loved the curry flavor. The freshly-squeezed lime juice was the perfect way to cool down that spice.

You can find the recipe here.

Takeaways:

• I prefer using spinach to kale.
• I would have roasted the chicken breast in the over, versus cooked it in the pan.
• Next time, I'd add another vegetable or maybe chickpeas.

Stir-Fried Beef & Broccoli

This was my favorite dish out of the three. I had made a similar dish the week before from my Home Chef box, but this one was better. I got a nice slight char on the broccoli, and the soy glaze marinade worked really well with the beef. I had never eaten or cooked with a persimmon before, and that ended up being the best part! A persimmon is a fruit that looks like an orange tomato. This recipe called for dicing it finely, and marinating it in mirin and rice wine vinegar, before adding it to the cooked white rice.

You can find the recipe here.

Takeaways:

• I LOVED the taste of the marinade for the persimmon, which was rice wine vinegar and mirin. I already keep rice wine vinegar in my pantry for my weekly Asian-marinated salmon, but I've definitely put mirin on my shopping list for next time, as well as persimmon. I want to make this rice dish again soon.
• I just love the beef, broccoli and asian flavor combo. I definitely need to work this in my biweekly repertoire. 

Provolone Cheeseburgers

This was my least favorite dish in the bunch. There was nothing wrong with it, but it seemed blah. Although the ground beef was organic and of very high quality, the recipe simply called for minced fresh garlic to add to the beef for flavor and I thought that was too little. I doubled the amount of garlic, and added some Worcestershire sauce as well. I hate beets so I skipped that part. The roasted potato wedges were good, but needed a dipping sauce. I mixed together ketchup and mayonnaise to use as a dipping sauce for the wedges, as well as slathered one half of the potato buns.

You can find the recipe here.